Jaime Gili was born in Caracas (Venezuela) in 1972. He grew up in a multicultural capital full of vibrant optical art, a concrete city full of optimism. Caracas, in the late seventies, presented its own version of the International modernism movement in art and architecture. Its own take on Utopia, the look of the city being created by artists and architects working together towards a single vision underwritten by a strong oil economy.

By the time Gili began his art studies in Prodiseño, Caracas in 1988, he was witnessing the willful destruction, dismantling and ruin of some of the city’s major institutions, its architecturally important buildings and its urban, public art.

Moving to Europe (with his newly claimed EU passport) in 1990, Gili lived and studied in Barcelona, where he concluded his BA in 1995 and a PhD from Universidad de Barcelona on ‘Repetition in Art’ in 2000. He also studied in Lisbon, Paris and Berlin. Jaime Gili has been based in London since 1996, when he began his studies at the Royal College of Art, graduating in 1998.

Gili is currently engaged in several series of paintings, curatorial projects and photographic works that reference historical and peripheral modern movements. His aim is to resurrect for the present the positive elements which served as a source of creative energy as he grew up. To bring about a new way to think Utopia. An ability to dream and be able to project and execute that dream.

In his latest work Gili depicts this imagined state, using signature forms which recall the best moments of modern abstraction, thereby creating a clash between imagined Utopia and reality.